Remember back to the years after World War II, when the very first homophile groups in the US furtively built a collective response to the state-sponsored demonization of sexual minorities. At this time, the federal government was working to expel known homosexuals from its offices, depicting same-sex sex and the people who had or desired it as dangerous to the state and its citizens. At the end of 1950, a Senate committee charged with investigating the matter of whether and to what extent the government employed homosexuals wrote of their damaging impact: “These perverts will frequently attempt to entice normal individuals to engage in perverted practices…. One homosexual can pollute a Government office” (D’Emilio, 1998, p. 42).
We have seen this echoed in many places in our narrative on LGBTQ social movements of the past few generations. Over and over again, LGBTQ people have been portrayed as dangerous threats to children and country. If we wonder if this narrative is outdated, we just have to look to the “bathroom bill” debates of recent years, in which transgender women are portrayed as menacing pedophiles trolling women’s bathrooms for young girls. If we think these anti-trans maneuvers are an outlier, we should look at the 2016 Republican Party platform, the document behind the election of Donald Trump. We can see here evidence that the political party in power has withdrawn protection for LGBTQ Americans, in the form of a defense of what it calls the “natural marriage” (Republican National Committee, 2016, p. 31) between one man and one woman: “Traditional marriage and family, based on marriage between one man and one woman, is the foundation for a free society and has for millennia been entrusted with rearing children and instilling cultural values” (2016, p. 11).
This political platform has a constituency. Recent studies find that while acceptance of LGBTQ people has been growing and is fairly high, “nearly a third of Americans remain uncomfortable with their LGBTQ family members, coworkers, and neighbors” (GLAAD, 2017, p. 7). Another national survey conducted in January 2017 found that 25 percent of LGBT respondents reported that they had experienced discrimination in the past year due to their gender identity or sexual orientation (Singh & Durso, 2017). Thus, despite the undeniable shift in public opinion concerning LGBTQ people, including their rights, and the fact that there are unprecedented levels of acceptance of out gay, lesbian, and bisexual people in urban neighborhoods, small towns, and suburbs across the US, this “post-gay” moment, as Ghaziani notes, “may not translate to post-discrimination” (2011, p. 120; also see Stein, 2001; Gray, 2009).
The story of LGBTQ social change in the US has told of the complicated relationship that this demeaned and marginalized group has with its country and its institutions. Some LGBTQ activists have fought their way into existing institutions and have put their lives on the line for the country to protect them and let them in. Others have all but given up, distrustful that the state could ever serve their interests or value them as human beings. They, instead, have put their energies toward broad critiques of the state and its norms and toward building alternative cultures and communities. At stake in these politics is American belonging and democracy – who gets to call themselves American (Bronski, 1998; Seidman, 2002).
We are, in the US, at a turning point in the state’s relationship with LGBTQ people. President Obama, especially in his second term, used his power and pulpit to advance LGBTQ civil rights. He spoke out for marriage equality and pulled the state back from defending laws that threatened it (for example, the Defense of Marriage Act). He used executive powers to enhance federal protections, particularly for transgender adults and children. We do not yet know the full extent of how, but we do know that the Trump administration is using the state in very different ways.
The emboldened Religious Right – now with an enthusiastic, loud, and unpredictable ally in the White House – will assert itself in its old ways, via fundamentalist Christianity and homophobic, transphobic politics. One of the cornerstones of the Republican agenda now is so-called religious freedom. This is a movement that has been building at the state level for years, in direct response to state-level marriage equality gains (Ghaziani et al., 2016). Over the past few years, the Right has fought marriage equality laws with claims that they impinge on the religious liberty of those who, for ostensibly religious reasons, oppose same-sex marriage and LGBTQ people. A number of states have considered or passed Religious Freedom Restoration Acts, which allow individuals to cite religious beliefs as justification for refusing to provide their services to particular clients or customers. While a federal RFRA has been on the books since 1993 and has nothing to do with LGBTQ rights, these newer state-level laws are clearly tied to the Religious Right’s growing concern over LGBTQ freedom and marriage equality (Fausett & Blinder, 2015; Franke, 2015). These “turn away the gay” bills – from a high-profile law in Indiana in March 2015, to a 2016 Mississippi law named the Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act, to bills that were vetoed by the governor of Arizona in February 2014 and the governor of Georgia in March 2016 – have been vigorously opposed by the mainstream American business, sports, and entertainment communities as being bad for business, meanspirited, and unjust (Terkel, 2015; Signorile, 2016).
During the 2016 presidential campaign, the Trump administration and the Republican Party indicated support for a federal version of these religious freedom laws called the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA). This would, like its state-level counterparts, give very broad leeway to people, businesses, and services to discriminate against LGBTQ people on religious grounds. By putting this in the language of protection from religious discrimination, the party sets religious rights against LGBTQ rights; the law would “bar government discrimination against individuals and businesses for acting on the belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman” (Republican National Committee, 2016, p. 11). This is not simply about bakers refusing to make cakes for two grooms; the law would give broad protections for refusal to provide health and social services to LGBTQ people. It endangers marriage equality, too, by giving state and local officials a tool to refuse access to marriage licenses and certifications (Michaelson, 2016). The political future of these federal religious liberty protections is still up in the air (E. Collins, 2017). So far, amid massive mobilization against it, Trump’s focus on religious freedom has not yet included a federal “license to discriminate” against LGBTQ people (Grindley & Ring, 2017).
Trump is already rolling back other protections for LGBTQ people that had been put in place by President Obama. This he can do relatively easily through executive action and executive rereadings of existing federal laws. For instance, in February 2017, his administration reinterpreted Title IX in a narrow way that no longer protects transgender students, revoking Obama’s interpretation. Trump’s administration sees civil rights issues – like transgender facilities access – as local rather than federal concerns. This leaves students in many states and districts unprotected (Ford, 2016; Somashekhar et al., 2017). Leading the charge may be Trump’s vice president, former Indiana Governor Mike Pence, whom many view as “one of the most extreme opponents of gay, lesbian and transgender people in the nation” (Boylan, 2016, n.p.; Stack, 2016b).
With Trump’s election, the progress narrative on LGBTQ civil rights – which has been bolstered in recent years by the federal win on marriage and the substantial, relatively quick shift in public opinion in favor of LGBTQ people and rights – has been interrupted, and the future of LGBTQ social justice is even more uncertain than before. Trump’s election – coming months after the tragic Pulse massacre, when 49 people were fatally shot in an Orlando gay nightclub on Latin Night one weekend in June 2016 – is a time when progressive people have reminded each other in countless Facebook and Twitter posts of the Martin Luther King, Jr. exhortation that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
With this longer look at justice struggles in mind, we remember the themes that have structured this look at LGBTQ social movements in the US since World War II and that can help us make sense of what comes next. First, the debate between assimilationism and liberationism as strategies for equality and social justice can be found in almost every example in the book, from the early tensions in the Mattachine Society in the early 1950s, to the varied approaches between second wave feminists and radical lesbian alternative community-builders, to the philosophical and tactical differences between Human Rights Campaign Fund advocates and Queer Nationalists in the 1990s. We see examples, too, of the ways in which this distinction between assimilationism and liberationism has been complicated, as in the example of ACT UP activists who fought with direct action, confrontational tactics, and a sense of urgency, while, at the same time, aiming their demands for treatment at the government. They had a radical analysis of the homophobia that turned the state away from them, but they did not give up on the same government that had ignored and maligned them for years.
Second, and relatedly, we have seen activists throughout the decades struggle with the limits and possibilities of law and policy for social change. Some have geared their work to the law and the state, in search of legal defense against discrimination, the freedom to marry, and state-funded AIDS treatment research. These civil rights fights have grown the movement, built the mainstream mainstays like HRC, and drawn in allies who have a strong sense that American law should at least be applied fairly. Others, like radical lesbian feminist groups in the 1970s or the founders of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in the 1980s, have either never trusted the state to provide them with protection or have simply looked elsewhere for change when the state seems beside the point. Instead of focusing on the law or the government, they have built alternative cultural and political institutions and relied on the community to fund and support their work.
Third, we have seen the many ways in which art and popular culture have been mobilized for social change, to change hearts and minds and build community when laws and public policy cannot. The earliest discretely disseminated homophile movement publications filled this role, as did the much louder discos of the 1970s, the stage lit mourning of the first AIDS survivors, and the online communities that young people have built around their identities and their pop cultural consumption. We also see the ways in which art, media, and celebrity are mobilized in order to change policy, as has been the case with athletes and hip-hop artists coming out for marriage equality and transgender rights. Culture, in this way, has been and is central to political mobilization for LGBTQ social change.
Fourth, we have seen the interconnectedness of social movements, in many places in the ways in which the LGBTQ movement and the Religious Right have fueled each other, building strength and visibility in their reaction to one another. The Right grew substantially when Anita Bryant’s anti-gay campaign in the late 1970s developed in response to a growing anti-discrimination movement across the country. For the LGBTQ movement’s part, the AIDS movement grew out of the shameful neglect of the Reagan administration when American citizens were dying in droves. In recent years, the anti-LGBTQ Right has gained momentum from marriage equality wins and has made anti-trans politics its next focus. We have also seen the ways in which the LGBTQ movement has drawn from other social movements of its time, like civil rights and Black Power in the 1960s and early 1970s, gaining a language to talk about pride and a set of strategies of protest and organization.
Finally, we have seen the many ways in which privilege plays a role in movement organizing, from the continued erasure of bisexual people and politics in the movement, to the marginalization of – if not outright disregard for – transgender people and experiences, to the many ways in which privileged white gay men have often set the agenda and the tone of the mainstream LGBTQ movement through its history. We have seen a number of ways in which activists who have some amount of structural power (by race, class, and gender, for instance) universalize their interests and set movement agendas on their own interests, while ignoring the ways in which these interests might overlook or directly clash with others in the broad and diverse LGBTQ community.
The discussion in these pages is incomplete. My hope is that there is enough here to prompt you to learn more and to inspire you to ask illuminating questions about social change. As you grapple with these questions, remember that LGBTQ movements come in many forms. In the pages of this book, we have stories of people asserting difference, stressing sameness, pushing the country and its institution to change for them, entering these institutions and changing them from the inside, starting their own communities for safety and power and togetherness. Activists in LGBTQ movements will continue to do what marginalized people have always done – some combination of demanding protections from their state and not relying on the state: making communities, making art, and finding ways for self-determination and love.